Articles

Sometimes the small tips are the nicest. If you own a smartphone or tablet it can be annoying to enter an email address in a regular textfield. If you fill out a form and select the email field you expect an virtual keyboard layout suited for filling in email addresses, not your default keyboard layout. The simple trick to get this field to behave is to use the HTML5 <input type="email" /> tag. Now the default Drupal 7 Form API only supports regular text inputs.

This website looks slightly different than it did yesterday. As a proof of concept I’ve made some changes to the header image and colour scheme. The very basic outline of the Code Culture logo allows it to be overlaid on any image (that isn’t too white). I’ve created a custom Drupal module which extracts a colour palette from any uploaded image. The 5 selected colors need to be distinct enough to form a palette. With some colour adaptations these 5 selected colours are used for generic things such as the breadcrumbs, link colours, and the striped background.

I’m back at testing the Drupal BlogApi. The XMLRPC blogapi used to be a core module in Drupal 6. But in Drupal 7 this module has been moved to contrib (ie, it’s no longer part of the Drupal core). But… the contrib module has been in an unstable state for some years now. Enter the Alternative Blogapi contrib module. It sounds daft to have 2 blog api modules in contrib (and it is). But at least this alternative is working (sort of).

As much as a I liked the design by Rob Krijgsman of the Code Culture logo and style, I was never really keen on the use of Helvetica as the body typeset. Reading this smashing article convinced me to make some changes to the typography of the site. Helvetica seems really stern, and I could really do with a slightly more vivid font. A sans-serif which has a serious tone but which is less formal than Helvetica.

I just finished the update to Drupal 7 for this website. Well, finished, it's a work in progress. Let's say I struggled my way to were the site's now. And it's been a bumpy road. I've played a bit with the betas, the release candidates and the first stable release. But this upgrade is the first truly in depth experience I've had with D7. My impression? The user experience is a lot smoother than it was in previous incarnations of my favorite CMS. However, there is a lot of work to be done still. And the upgrade path is far from smooth.

When designing websites graphic designers often draw a neat picture in photoshop. The day to day use of a website greatly differs from this ideal scenario. The design shows a calm and readable site with demo text. But the actual website in use everything but serene and readable. The text style is usually the first aspect of a site that gets diluted. Both users and visitors create content or leave comments which just don't fit the initial picture painted by the designer. A lot of problems stem from the use of wysiwyg editors in content management systems.